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"Over a week ago."

The number landed between them. Over a week. She'd been working the site, uncovering the treaty stone, documenting the evidence of forced pride sacrifices and rewritten history, and he'd been sitting on information that connected directly to her findings for over a week.

"You knew," she said. "You knew someone was actively interfering with my dig. You knew there was a tiger shifter elder in town with a personal stake in keeping the site buried. And you said nothing."

"I didn't have the full picture."

"You had more than I did. You had a name. You had motive. You had evidence of historical tampering that corroborated exactly what I was uncovering in the field." Her voice was level but the temperature in it was dropping fast. "I spent four days locked out of my own site because of permit delays I couldn't explain. I found tiger pride ward signatures carved into my excavation overnight. I uncovered a treaty stone with two layers of inscription, one of which describes forced sacrifices hidden under the language of unity. And this entire time, you had context that would have helped me understand what I was dealing with."

"I was trying to figure it out before I brought it to you."

"You were trying to manage the situation."

"That's not what I was doing."

"Then what would you call sitting on information about a threat to my work? To my safety?" She stood up because sitting felt like conceding ground. "The trench collapse at the site. The ridge face failure. Were those him too?"

Criss's silence was the answer.

"And you knew. When you showed up that night and the chamber collapsed around me. You already suspected who was behind it."

"Suspected. Not confirmed."

"And you still said nothing. You shifted, you saved me, we..." She stopped. Drew a breath. "You let me lie there in the dirt with you afterward and you didn't say a word about any of this."

"What was I supposed to say? Hey, by the way, there's an elder from my pride who rewrote my family's history and is now trying to bury your dig, literally, because my ancestors benefited from seventy years of silence?" He was on his feet now too, the chair pushed back, his voice rough. "How does that conversation go, Steph? You'd already shut me out once for showing up at the site uninvited. You avoided me for a week after we slept together. Every time I've tried to help, you've treated it like an invasion. So tell me exactly when I was supposed to bring you information you'd have used to push me further away."

"That wasn't your call to make."

"And what would you have done? If I'd told you about Ashkar and the records and the gaps? You'd have gone straight to the council, filed a report, and cut me out of it entirely. Because that's what you do. You handle things alone. You don't let anyone in unless they've passed some test you haven't told them about."

"I let you in." The words came out harder than she intended. "I let you in and you were hiding things from me. How is that different from every other man who decided he knew better than I did about my own life?"

The question hit him visibly. His jaw locked. His hands dropped to his sides.

"I'm not whoever made you this way," he said quietly.

"No, you're not. You're something worse. You're someone I actually started to trust." She stepped back from him. "You want to protect and decide and control the information flow, and when it all goes sideways you want credit for showing up."

"I showed up because the ground was trying to swallow you."

"And I'm grateful. I am. But gratitude and trust are not the same thing, and you broke the second one."

The room was small and getting smaller. Morning light came through the window in grey slats, catching the dust motes between them. She could see his pulse in his throat. Fast. She could see the effort it was costing him not to close the distance, not to reach for her, not to do the thing his body provoking him to do.

"My ancestors were complicit," he said. "I'm not going to pretend otherwise. They benefited from what Rydan did, whatever it was. They kept quiet while other families were stripped of their history and their autonomy, and they survived because silence was easier than principle." He met her eyes. "But I didn't agree to that. I didn't know about it until two weeks ago, and the moment I started digging, Rydan showed up to tell me my bloodline owed its existence to keeping my mouth shut."

"And what did you tell him?"

"Nothing. Because I didn't know what to say." His honesty was blunt, graceless. "I've spent my whole life avoiding the Holt legacy because I thought it was boring and pointless. Turns out it's built on something worse than that, and I don't know what to do with it. But I know I don't want to be the version of a Holt that Rydan expects."

"Then you should have told me. From the start. All of it. And let me decide what to do with my own excavation based on complete information instead of whatever filtered version you thought I could handle."

"You're right."

"I know I'm right."

Silence filled the space between them. The kind that happens when two people have said the truest things they have and none of it fixed anything.